Writing in the 1970s, the playwrights’ response to colonialist writings about the Mau Mau movement in The Trial of Dedan Kimathi is to sing the praises of the deeds of this hero of the resistance who refused to surrender to British imperialism. It is not a reproduction of the farcical “trial” at Nyeri. Rather, according to the preface, it is “an imaginative recreation and interpretation of the collective will of the Kenyan peasants and workers in their refusal to break under sixty years of colonial torture and ruthless oppression by the British ruling classes and their continued determination to resist exploitation, oppression and new forms of enslavement.”